Teammates

Colin Mcgregor

Description

Depuis plus de 5 ans, Colin McGregor est chroniqueur en français pour le magazine d’information et de sensibilisation Reflet de Société.
Colin a ensuite été le traducteur de deux livres, Quebec Suicide Prevention Handbook et Love in 3 D, leur permettant de passer du français à l’anglais.
Maintenant Colin vient de publier son premier livre en solo, un roman, Teammates, en version originale anglophone.

Teammates
Three teenage friends on a college rugby team in the shrinking community of English Montreal – three friends each facing wildly different fates. This is the story of Bill Putnam, whose downward trajectory we first begin to trace in the late 1970s, and his friends Rudy and Max.
Teammates, their paths will cross in ways they never dreamt of in the happier days of their youth.

Sujets

• Urban Lit
• Street Lit
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Éditions TNT
• Date de parution: 14 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782923375908
• Langue: English

Extrait

Teammates
By Colin McGregor
Cowansville, Quebec




Éditeur
Teammates
By Colin McGregor
Published by
Les Éditions TNT
625 Avenue de la Salle
Montreal, (Quebec) H1V 2J3
[phone] Fax: [phone]
[e-mail]
www.editionstnt.com

Cover illustration
Ian Fortin

graphic design
JuanCa

Copyright
Colin McGregor
The words printed herein make up a small slice of the story of our world. They have not been written selfishly, to be kept to ourselves. They are to be shared, offered in all humility, simply presented, and with love for you, the reader.
The partial reproduction of passages from this book is authorized for non-profit purposes, as long as the original source is mentioned and referenced.

Legal Deposit Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec
Legal Deposit Library and Archives Canada

ISBN PAPIER: 978-2-923375-27-4
ISBN PDF: 978-2-923375-89-2
ISBN E-PUB: 978-2-923375-90-8





Printed in Canada


1
An overnight blizzard can completely transform a modern city.
8:30 a.m. on a weekday: trudging from point A to point B in the heart of a city of three million other beating hearts. The new snowfall had brought with it an almost eerie quiet, muffling Montreal’s hum. And the storm had kept a good number of citizens off the roads. I was on a lonely country trail.
I made my goat-footed way up a long wooden stairway that cut through a small stand of trees on the side of a hill. At the top sat the college: a fairy castle clothed in ice and frost, its ground floor half-buried by snowdrifts.
Cutting a path through a powdery playing field and past a skating rink, I slid up a steep driveway to the school’s front entrance.
Had it not been for that smallish billboard sporting the words “Marianopolis College” in cursive writing, you’d have no idea there was anything at all discreetly nestled at the foot of the thickly wooded embankment by this busy urban thoroughfare.
I joined the small crowd in front of the sign. Before me ran Cote des Neiges Road, a major urban artery six lanes wide. “Snowy Hillside” Road, to translate from the French, wound its lazy, serpentine path up and down the side of Mount Royal. Across the street: the hospital in which I was born.
I have not gone very far at all in my 17 years, I dreamt, half-awake. For the few unfortunates trying to negotiate their way up and down the avenue, it was a good thing that medical care was this close at hand. Cote des Neiges was one giant skating rink.
The show had begun.
The usual suspects had gathered to watch. Two of them were friends: Max and Rudy and I walked a few feet uphill, and took our position.
A dark gray station wagon, its tires squealing a vain protest, drifted laterally towards a fire hydrant a few yards up.
Max sneered.
“You’re late.”
I shrugged.
He gestured towards the road. “They’ve been at it all morning.”
Down from us a compact car spun helplessly, in slow motion.
Max shook his head. “That’s the third vehicle we’ve seen slide into that part of the sidewalk.”
Rudy nodded. “Idiots.”
Four abandoned cars and an empty city bus were strewn at various angles within sight. Not one of them pointed straight down or uphill.
Minutes passed. A petite yellow Volkswagen Beetle corkscrewed slowly towards an imposing limestone façade a hundred yards downhill. As it did, another station wagon hit a fire hydrant with a dull thud. The defeated motorist got out, spat, kicked his vehicle’s tires and began swearing like a sailor. We couldn’t make out everything he screamed, but at one point in his tirade, he clearly called his poor Chrysler Le Baron “Brain dead.”
Max craned his neck to focus on the Volkswagen as it wafted like a snowflake towards its inevitable doom. The little bug’s wheels spun uselessly. It softly came to rest in a snowbank in front of the Convent of the Sacred Heart.
I felt my shoulder sting through my ski jacket. It was Rudy, from behind, punching.
“Howya?” he said hoarsely. “More fodder for that diary of yours, eh?”
I nodded. My lips were frozen shut; my mouth wasn’t working. I brought my mittens up to my face to thaw out a few talking muscles.
Max didn’t turn his head. “Bill Putnam, ya gotta stop the diary stuff. Only 14 year old girls keep a diary every night.”
Rudy brushed several locks of his mousy brown bangs away from his eyes and shot me a conspiratorial wink. Jerking his mullet towards Max, whose eyes were still riveted on the Beetle, Rudy mumbled: “The man’s obsessed.”
Max huffed.
“He’s hoping there’s a stranded princess he can rescue in one of these cars. A damsel in distress. Anything to get…”
“Hey!” Max stared daggers. “ Offside! That’s not what this is about.”
“Really?” Rudy said.
“Really: cars crashing into solid objects. It doesn’t get any better than this . What’s wrong with you people?” Satisfied he’d made his point, he turned his back to us and focused once again on the stricken VW.
Rudy smiled a crocodile smile. “Now, be honest Max,” he said. “Let’s say some shapely 22-year-old brunette in a compact car broadsides, say, that wall.” He pointed at the brick wall fronting the hospital grounds. “You wouldn’t slide over across the ice and help her out? Want us to buy that? ”
Max thoughtfully furrowed his brow for a second then replied: “Well, in that case, yes I would come to her assistance. I am a gentleman .”
Rudy and I exploded with laughter. Max didn’t crack a smile.
“You Dutchmen,” Max said, pointing an accusing finger at Rudy, “will stick your fingers in any dike. I, however, am here to help the oppressed.”
Minutes more passed. Eventually, a police car parked at the top of the hill. Two officers got out and placed a row of orange traffic cones across the asphalt.
The show was over. 9:30 a.m. My feet were frozen solid, and I had a class.
“Okay guys,” I said, “it’s been a slice, but I’m in a gotsa go situation. Lab in 15 minutes, and…”
Rudy grabbed my arm. “Wait,” he pleaded, “this’ll be priceless. Two more minutes.”
Max had left us, sliding cautiously along the ice towards the other side of the road.
A shiny little red Subaru sat immobile along the sidewalk across from us, its taillights pointed in our direction. All we could see from our perch was a long mane of raven hair on the driver’s side of the front seat. Help was on its way – in the form of Knight Errant Max, risking all to rescue the damsel.
Max teetered up to the driver’s side window. Splaying his feet wide apart to establish his balance, the White Knight knocked politely on the window. Speaking loud enough to be heard through automotive glass, he smilingly offered any help he might be able to provide.
We could not hear exactly what Max might have yelled. But it could not have been very well received. The car door shot open, almost knocking Max to the pavement. A tiny, thoroughly enraged man with a mullet – business in the front, party in the back – screamed in French. Judging by his handlebar moustache, this was no princess.
Max slowly backed away, buckling from time to time like an elephant on a frozen river.
Rudy’s chest welled up with unsuppressed joy.
“The dike has sprung a leak,” he said.
I turned and left for class, leaving Rudy laughing so hard he had trouble drawing breath.


2

The bell rang. We spilled out of the lab and into the corridor: twenty-one teenaged, lab-coated chemistry students disgorged back into the halls of a nun-run Catholic college. We were creatures of science and logic nestled in the bosom of an institution built on faith. Signs of this paradox were not hard to find. A large, ornately carved wood crucifix greeted me on my way out. It hung on the wall immediately opposite our lab.
I felt a jolt in my ribs. “C’mon,” said a squeaky, feminine voice attached to the elbow. “You make a better wall than a door. Get along!”
I didn’t dare turn around. I knew that this ‘Minnie Mouse on helium’ voice emanated from the cherry lips of my fellow science student, the heart-stoppingly beautiful Christina. And whenever I looked Christina in the eye my sentences began with dumb, clauseless utterances followed by slobbering bursts of kindergarten babble. It was best to look away.
“Sorry,” I said. “You must be in a rush. I was only…”
Christina did not respect my space in the slightest. Grinning from ear to flawless ear, she grabbed my eyeglasses and playfully removed them.
“You’re supposed to leave your safety goggles in the lab,” she said. “Electrolysis is over. No stealing college property.”
Squinting, I gently took my glasses from her hand, turned them around and held them up so she could peer through the lenses. “Not goggles,” I said. “Mine. Sight. Necessary.”
She peered through the lenses and recoiled. “You aren’t lying!” she squealed. “You’re blind as a bat! But you don’t wear these when you play rugby. How do you manage to see the ball?”
“Really, on the field I’m better off without them,” I said, looking directly at her through the mists of my vision. “That way I can’t see the carnage around me, either. If I could see how hard the sport really is, there’s probably no way I’d be stupid enough to get on the field and risk life and limb for a dumb oval lump of leather.”
I felt my face crack a smile. My sentences finally had verbs. The ghostly blob of haze before me evoked far less anxiety than the sharply-defined Christina I saw through my eyeglasses.
“Wow,” she said, smiling. “He speaks! You should speak more often. Anyway, I’m off to physics. I await your next sentence with great anticipation.”
And with that, she turned and walked away. I almost poked an eye out as I rushed to put my glasses back on, to watch her bounce away in her fr